That’s right, I think I’ve worked out the secret to become successful at absolutely anything at all. It’s worked for me when it comes to playing the guitar, writing music, music production, marketing, and even building a (small, I know) Medium audience. …

Many an SEO has gone astray by doing everything right. Read all about search engine optimization, article after article on Medium or Moz or Hubspot, and you’ll likely come away thinking that you get it. SEO is about identifying relatively high-volume and low-competition keywords, then building fast, robust pages all about them, you’ll tell your coworkers. You’ll bring up the…

On trickery, emotional guilt, and flawed logic — If we’re honest with ourselves as marketers, we’ll admit that what we do can border on unethical. People sell their time and labor in return for money. Marketers convince consumers to select a particular product or service when spending their money. …

Email design, images, copy, the devil is in the details — I just got home from HighEdWeb 2019, which was an excellent conference on web technology in higher education. I learned a lot about the challenges facing colleges and universities, as well as the creative solutions they’re implementing to overcome them. …

There’s more that keeps us going back than just honest communication — You’ve probably heard it said that consumers only buy from those they trust. It’s easier to understand what that means when you think of salespeople. Like, imagine you walk into a car dealership and one of their salesmen approaches you. He’s probably wearing a suit and tie. He’s probably friendly…

Keep it clean and simple, implement trends, and get expert advice when you need it — In the SEO world, there’s nothing scarier than a big algorithm update. It’s kind of like if you worked on cars for a living and all the manufacturers could snap their fingers and make it so that every car in the world suddenly ran on almond milk instead of gas…

If cursing is part of who you are, don’t dial it down to please customers — When you think about top brands and the way in which they communicate with their customers, you probably don’t imagine a lot of cursing. Marketing communications tend to strive for a level of professionalism that doesn’t include or condone vulgarity. …

Maybe it’s time we put them to rest — I used to make a game of replying to cold-call emails. In my mind, cold-call emails were akin to spam. I didn’t want them. 99% of the time, I had no interest in the product or service the poor sales guy was schlepping. So I had fun with it. After…

Here’s why and how one company is already living this vision — I’m a digital marketer. I have been for ten years. But I use an ad-blocker whenever I browse the web. That’s a dramatic problem for digital advertisers. If online advertising is so bad that advertisers themselves won’t even put up with it, why would we expect anybody else to? We…